Traditionally, power in the entertainment industry came from the ability to control the creation and distribution of content, but new technologies have made this process easier. The scarce resource now is audience attention, and the power of digital entertainment platforms lies in having the data to manage and direct this attention. Today that data is primarily owned by Netflix and Amazon, but it may soon come from new platforms enabled by the mergers of NBCUniversal and Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner, and Walt Disney and Fox.

People may fear the trend of more media content coming from data-driven platform companies instead of industry insiders, from eggheads rather than creators. But the truth is that it lets the creators shine by finding an audience for their work, however esoteric it may be. Rather than killing creativity, perhaps big data is fostering a new golden age of creativity.

David Hain's insight:

The creative power of using data effectively - interesting story of Netflix.

Never before has it been so important for the C-suite to keep an eye on the macro and micro environment. Blink and you might have missed a seismic shift that could be cataclysmic. However, it’s not just the ability to maintain a forensic appreciation of the latest trends that are needed -- it’s the capability to adapt. But organizational change takes time -- particularly the decision making process behind the change. Therefore, a decision making framework through which all opportunities are assessed relative to the organization and external factors is probably the one essential business process in today’s fast-paced landscape.

David Hain's insight:

Some useful models for strategic decision making in a 'blink and you've missed it' environment.

Any company can follow the same path as these successful firms, and an increasing number of companies are doing just that. If you join them, you will need to cultivate the ability to translate the strategic into the everyday. This means linking strategy and execution closely together by creating distinctive, complex capabilities that set your company apart, and applying them to every product and service in your portfolio. These capabilities combine all the elements of execution — technology, human skills, processes, and organizational structures — to deliver your company’s chosen value proposition.

How do you accomplish this on a day-to-day basis? How do you get the strategists and implementers in your company to work together effectively? These 10 principles, derived from our experience at Strategy&, can help you avoid common pitfalls and accelerate your progress. For companies that truly embrace strategy through execution, principles like these become a way of life.

David Hain's insight:

Strategy/Execution. Most of my clients treat this as either/or. Working out how to make it 'and' is a critical differentiator.

Congratulations! Your organization is performing at or near the top of its game, or it has been in the recent past. Perhaps even better, you have a strategy to improve in the near future. Now for the bad news: the good news won’t last.

It can’t—at least without the right kind of organization. Across industries, barely half of the top performers sustain their leadership position over the course of a decade, according to research by our colleagues in McKinsey’s Strategy Practice. The challenges in maintaining dominance are not new; even sectors that digitization has not consigned to oblivion have seen flagships such as Delta Airlines, General Motors, and Owens Corning move from the top into Chapter 11 and then back into leadership positions again.

Over the past several decades, the business world has relentlessly pursued efficiency-driven business process reengineering, seeking to integrate, standardize, and automate tasks in ways that can reduce costs, increase speed, and deliver more predictable outcomes. As the landscape shifts, perhaps it’s time for organizations to expand their focus beyond business process reengineering to pursue business practice redesign, helping frontline workgroups to learn faster and accelerate performance improvement, especially in environments that are shaped by increasing uncertainty and unexpected events. The perspective we outline here goes beyond the growing work done on high-performing teams and agile practices by focusing specifically on the practices necessary to accelerate performance improvement over time.

David Hain's insight:

With virtually nothing left to cut, do businesses need to switch from redesigning business processes to redeveloping the business culture? The argument too do so is pretty compelling. The challenges of doing so are numerous and difficult!

In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that every innovation strategy fails eventually, because innovation is, at its core, about solving problems — and there are as many ways to innovate as there are types of problems to solve. There is no one “true” path to innovation.

Yet all too often, organizations act as if there is. They lock themselves into one type of strategy and say, “This is how we innovate.” It works for a while, but eventually it catches up with them. They find themselves locked into a set of solutions that don’t fit the problems they need to solve. Essentially, they become square-peg companies in a round-hole world and lose relevance.

We need to start treating innovation like other business disciplines — as a set of tools that are designed to accomplish specific objectives. Just as we wouldn’t rely on a single marketing tactic or a single source of financing for the entire life of an organization, we need to build up a portfolio of innovation strategies designed for specific tasks.

It was with this in mind that I created the Innovation Matrix to help leaders identify the right type of strategy to solve a problem, by asking two questions: How well can we define the problem? and How well can we define the skill domain(s) needed to solve it?

Leaders should view change not as an occasional disruptor but as the very essence of the management job. Setting tough goals, establishing processes to reach them, carrying out those processes and carefully learning from them — these steps should characterize the unending daily life of the organization at every level. More companies need to describe their work in terms of where they are trying to go in the next month or next quarter or next year.

David Hain's insight:

Its not 'business as usual' or 'change management'. Change is the work!

I like David Hain's insight that change is the work For me though only part of the story In terms of management today that's about processes and things associated. Change management is an oxymoron It's part of the hangover from the Industrial Revolution where people in power believe they could control people and things. They were wrong!

Most people go through life not really getting any smarter. Why? They simply won't do the work required.

It's easy to come home, sit on the couch, watch TV, and zone out until bedtime rolls around. But that's not going to help you get smarter.

Sure, you can go into the office the next day and discuss the details of last night's episode of Mad Men or Game of Thrones. And yes, you know what happened on Survivor. But that's not knowledge accumulation; that's a mind-numbing sedative.

You can acquire knowledge if you want it. In fact, there is a simple formula, which if followed is almost certain to make you smarter over time. Simple but not easy.

It involves a lot of hard work.

We'll call it the Buffett formula, named after Warren Buffett and his longtime business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. These two are an extraordinary combination of minds. They are also learning machines.

David Hain's insight:

Better change comes from better learning, here's how it's done by two of the best!

It's important to think about the opportunity cost of this hour. On one hand, you can check Twitter, read some online news, and reply to a few emails while pretending to finish the memo that is supposed to be the focus of your attention. On the other hand, you can dedicate the time to improving yourself. In the short term, you're better off with the dopamine-laced rush of email and Twitter while multitasking. In the long term, the investment in learning something new and improving yourself goes further.

“Who’s my most valuable client?” And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day.

One area so far relatively untouched by big data is change management. That’s not because there isn’t a problem to solve. The failure of major transformation projects to deliver the expected benefits is a well-documented phenomenon: many change programs simply do not achieve their business goals.

It’s time for that to change. The combination of predictive analytics, large data sets, and the processing power of today’s computers is starting to transform change management. Just as the discipline of marketing has transformed from soft to hard science in the past 20 years, so too will the practice of change. But before that can happen, we have to understand why data has failed to catch on in change management to date.

David Hain's insight:

Will big data transform transformation? It has the potential, do we have the nous?

On December 31st, 1929 the Indian National Congress, the foremost nationalist group on the subcontinent, issued a Declaration of Purna Swaraj, or complete independence from British rule. It also announced a campaign of civil disobedience, but no one had any idea what form it should take. That task fell to Mohandas Gandhi.

The Mahatma returned to his ashram to contemplate next steps. He needed to come up with something that would unite the Indian people, but not get them so riled up that it would lead to violence. After weeks of meditation, he emerged with an answer that impressed no one. In fact, it seemed like a joke. He would march for salt.

Yet it turned out to be a stroke of genius that would invigorate the movement for Indian independence like nothing else could and break the British hold on power. In doing so, Gandhi proved himself to be not only a potent spiritual leader, but also a master strategist. Today, there's still a lot we can learn from Gandhi about making change happen.

David Hain's insight:

Gandhi didn't start off a a 'saint', but he learned how too make change movements work!

Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, 4 times more accurate than human nurses. Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.

David Hain's insight:

Remember when your mobile phone was an irritating brick? Bet it isn't now! But it appears we ain't seen nothin' yet!

The Uncertainty Capability: The Secret to Preparing for the Next Disruption

Answering this question is important on both a personal and organizational level — and regardless of whether you are a technology company or an enterprise. The reason is that the critical capability is not the identification of the next disruptive force, but rather the ability to rapidly adapt to whatever disruption may come.

The reason that many industry leaders missed the significance of the Internet is that we are all subject to something called the “curse of knowledge.” Coined by a Stanford graduate student, it simply means that once we know something to be true, it becomes very difficult to both imagine that anybody else doesn’t know this truth and to break free of the box that the knowledge creates around us.

The current incarnations of Internet-fueled technologies have become our new reality. We understand how it works, we have made plans for the future based on that understanding and are therefore naturally hesitant to accept anything that may challenge that preconception. It is the curse of knowledge in action.

Anyone attempting to lead change in an organization knows to expect some resistance. Change is not a rational process; no matter how positive the future you are creating, it’s natural for humans to struggle with it.

Such resistance is no less frustrating for being predictable. At times, it can seem that all that stands between you and your goals are a few naysayers and whiners. And to those on a mission, such reactions can seem like putting one’s head in the sand. “The old business is not coming back,” one CEO told me. “We have to innovate or we will die.” Faced with negative remarks, critical questions, or stony silence, change champions naturally begin to interact more with those already on board, consciously or unconsciously distancing themselves from those who “don’t get it.

Gradually, a wall begins to form between “us” and “them” — champions who support the change, and resisters who openly or quietly oppose it. Unfortunately, approaching change with an “us versus them” mind-set actually increases pushback. When we think of people as resisters, we don’t truly engage with them. We tend to discount their perspective, assuming that if we are right, they must be wrong.

David Hain's insight:

People who resist change initiatives may be Luddites - or they may be Guardians, hold continue to see value in the way things are done. How you regard them will likely determine your approach, and your success rate!

Accomplish your goals.Working more doesn’t always mean getting more done. Startup expert Eric Ries and author Morten Hansen discuss how the tides are turning for businesses in the digital age, and how we can adjust our behavior to match.

David Hain's insight:

We're all busy today, sometimes too busy to work out whether we're working on the right things. A useful conversation on thinking about whether you really spend your time on activities that really move the needle.

The importance of design is only increasing. Consumers have instant access to global marketplaces and ever-higher expectations of service. They no longer distinguish between physical and digital experiences. This makes it increasingly difficult to make your product or service stand out from the crowd. As a result, design has become a CEO-level topic for many executives.

But while the concept of “design thinking” emerged as far back as 1969, and while many companies have tried to adopt its principles, relatively few have made true shifts in growth and profitability through design. Fewer still have been able to prove concretely the exact value of the design actions they’ve taken.

We have begun to explore the underlying design practices that allow some firms to succeed above others. Our research into global companies across multiple industries aims to uncover the connections between business value and design. Our early findings, presented in this article, are not yet statistically significant; we will continue to expand our data set in 2018 to reach that goal. But already some trends are evident. We see ten design actions across three themes that appear to correlate with improved financial performance.

David Hain's insight:

Design thinking becoming more embedded? Or just good business practice without the trendy name?

Steve Denning: In 2011, I wrote that the Shift Index was the most important business study ever. It’s great to have it updated, although disappointing to see that there has been continuing decline.

John Hagel: Hopefully, it’s a wake-up call. The core message is that technology is creating this mounting pressure to do things differently. It’s creating a world that is very different from the world that businesses have operated in the past. So until they figure out how to reconfigure their businesses and their operations, they are going to face mounting pressure and the deteriorating performance. The positive side is that the situation creates virtually unlimited opportunities if they can figure it out and adapt to the new world.

Hagel. Unfortunately the reaction of many companies when faced with mounting pressure is to do what they have always done, that is to squeeze harder on what they are currently doing, and try to squeeze more out of everybody. One of the most striking contrasts is the metric around labor productivity, which has been steadily increasing, versus the return on assets which has been plummeting.

David Hain's insight:

Useful dialogue on why Deloitte Shift Index shows that the return on assets continues to fall and what to do. Hint - it's not the same as you always did, only faster and harder...

A good conversation to take in Key for me "One of the things we see in the history of movements is the importance of action at the local level." Local leadership is a key to success in the new world of work

Today’s organizations and institutions are suffering from a severe case of responsiveness lag, where their internal structures, operating procedures and time signatures are increasingly out of sync with the external pace and scale of change. As Jack Welch, the legendary chief executive of General Electric, famously quipped: “If the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is near.”

Today, organizations and institutions are disappearing at increasing rates because they are failing to adapt to the increasing complexity of the economic ecosystem. To survive digital Darwinism, organizations and institutions must evolve into ‘instant enterprises’ that maintain a perpetual state of readiness to respond to the unexpected.

David Hain's insight:

The case for a continuous approach to change, not one-off transformation. The change is the work!

In response to the financial crisis, US authorities tested how banks would perform under a variety of stresses, including a slumping economy, high unemployment, stock and bond market shocks, and foreign-currency gyrations. However, banks aren’t the only institutions that find themselves vulnerable when the external environment tosses a curveball. In recent years, power companies, oil and gas firms, healthcare operators, media firms, and others all have been subject to adverse scenarios that far exceeded their planners’ imagination. Using stress tests, managers can identify and mitigate potential shocks by turning over every rock to give extreme “what-ifs” a closer look.

David Hain's insight:

McKinsey suggests that stress tests should be used much more widely for risk management across organisational sectors.

This was U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ plea to business during his opening of the High-Level Meeting of Caring for Climate, held during COP23 — the annual U.N. climate conference — in Bonn earlier this month. Generally, when the words "misbehave" and "business" appear together, we expect to hear about business behaving badly. But for the secretary-general, this was an enthusiastic call to action for companies everywhere to disrupt "business-as-usual" on climate action and call on governments to ramp up policy ambition.

Everyone has a role to play in a performance transformation. The role of CEOs is unique in that they stand at the top of the pyramid and all the other members of the organization take cues from them. CEOs who give only lip service to a transformation will find everyone else doing the same. Those who fail to model the desired mind-sets and behavior or who opt out of vital initiatives risk seeing the transformation lose focus. Only the boss of all bosses can ensure that the right people spend the right amount of time driving the necessary changes.

David Hain's insight:

Transformation doesn't happen from the top - but it never happens without the top! 4 key roles for CEOs.

n the early 1990s, Barnes and Noble superstores changed how we shop for books. A few years later, Amazon was transforming how we shop for and purchase books, which then transformed how we shop for everything. Blockbuster changed how we watched movies; Netflix and other streaming services transformed and utterly upended how we watch movies.

Those and other examples like them also illustrate the possible ramifications that exist when comparing change and transformation. Barnes and Noble has survived, but barely. Blockbuster went under years ago. By contrast, Amazon and Netflix have grown and flourished.

Many people sense that the way organizations are run today has been stretched to its limits. In survey after survey, businesspeople make it clear that in their view, companies are places of dread and drudgery, not passion or purpose. Organizational disillusionment afflicts government agencies, nonprofits, schools, and hospitals just as much. Further, it applies not just to the powerless at the bottom of the hierarchy. Behind a facade of success, many top leaders are tired of the power games and infighting; despite their desperately overloaded schedules, they feel a vague sense of emptiness. All of us yearn for better ways to work together — for more soulful workplaces where our talents are nurtured and our deepest aspirations are honored.

The premise of this article is that humanity is at a threshold; a new form of organization is emerging into public view. Anthropological research suggests that this is a natural next step in a process that began more than 100,000 years ago. There have been, according to this view, at least five distinct organizational paradigms in human history. Could the current organizational disillusionment be a sign that civilization is outgrowing the current model and getting ready for the next?

David Hain's insight:

"Humanity at a threshold"...Fred Laloux on one way of using organisations positively to take the right direction.

Those of us who work in the tech sector get excited about new innovations every day. It’s part of why it’s such a fun industry to work in. But the success of Johnson Controls tells us something important about the key to a long life in the tech sector. What matters is not technology by itself, but what technology can do for people.

David Hain's insight:

Nice case story about the ups and downs of corporate longevity and the need to embrace technology sensibly.

Caution is in order because "Agile Transformation" always is a roller coaster ride where you and your teams must hang on for dear life!

Now - before getting on to the Agile roller coaster band-wagon ask “Why do we need to do it?” first. Don't get on the newness rollercoaster until solid answers are articulated and a clear destination is envisaged as to "why" we need it.

David Hain's insight:

A cautionary tale about the power and possible problems of agile transformation in a complex world - plus a couple of excellent literary tips!

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